Adventures in Software

Get your Scala on …

Is Scala too hard for the average developer, or just right? Make your own assessment over the next 6 weeks, at Six Weeks of Scala or attend my talk at 1DevDay on Saturday where this will be the topic of discussion.

Tonight, we’re kicking off the “Six Weeks of Scala” at SRT. Starting at 5 pm, we’ll be gathering to do some coding on Scala. Everyone is welcome. If you’re a newbie (or not yet committed to Scala development), the Scala interpreter is a simple way to get started with the language. If you want to do some test-driven development, you might prefer to come with an IDE and plugin installed. We’ll self-organize into groups based on goals for our six weeks. You don’t need to commit to all six weeks. Just come when you can (free and open to all).

On Saturday, the organizers of 1DevDay have invited me to talk about Scala. Here’s the abstract for my talk:

Scala: Too Hard for the Average Developer?

Scala has gotten a lot of press in the past few years. Some people love it for its support of functional programming. Others think it’s a completely awesome replacement for Java. But others think it’s way too complex for the average developer. Let’s put it all out there. In this talk, we’ll look at the syntax together and decide what there is to love and what there is to hate.

By the end of this talk, you will have enough exposure to the language to make up your own mind about Scala. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if you’re an average developer or not!

I’m scheduled to speak from 10:15-11:15. Dennis Burton, also from SRT Solutions, is speaking on MongoDB at the same time. I’m also looking forward to finally meeting Matt Stine, of the Memphis Java User Group and No Fluff Just Stuff, who is speaking on Polyglot OSGi and Grails/YUI. Nilanjan Raychaudhuri is speaking on Play, a Scala/Java Web Framework, Gordon Dickens is talking about Spring Roo and Joel Hawkins is talking about Hadoop. If that’s not enough to interest you, Chris Judd of the Cleveland Java User Group is talking about Beginning iOS development, and Nayan Hajratwala is running a full day Code Retreat. Saturday should be a fun day indeed!